Archive: Chinese

Translator's Note:

Bai Hua is considered to be the central literary figure of the post-Misty Poetry movement during the 1980s. Born in 1956 in Chongqing, he read English literature at Guangzhou Foreign Language Institute before graduating with a master’s degree in Western literary history from Sichuan University. His first collection of poems, Expression (1988), found immediate critical acclaim. A highly demanding writer, Bai Hua has a small but selective poetic output: in the past thirty years he’s written approximately ninety poems, most of which command a large audience in his nation today. After a silence of more than a decade, he began writing poetry again in 2007. That same year, his work garnered the prestigious Rougang Poetry Award. A prolific writer of critical prose and hybrid texts, Bai Hua is also a recipient of the Anne Kao Poetry Prize. Currently living in Chengdu, Sichuan, he teaches at the Southwestern Transportation University.

Translator's Note:

Award-winning poet Lan Lan is one of China’s most well-loved female writers today. Her lyrical writings contain a sensual yet profound simplicity that often explores a specific emotion both in its purity and complexity. Considered one of the few contemporary women poets who’ve invented a new genre of romance poetry, she transcends the sentimental via a poetic imagination of dialogues between emotions, energies, and specific moments. Also known for their intriguing observations of nature and social realities, each of Lan Lan’s poems are crafted in a specific architecture–both linguistic and temporal–that either dramatizes or challenges the contextual significance of the work. In addition to her poetry, Lan Lan’s bestselling work includes children’s literature and lyrical prose. Here we present a sampling of five poems–“Inside Eternity…,” “Vérité,” “Wind,” “Wild Sunflowers,” and “Untitled”–from Selected Works of Lan Lan, published in honor of her literary prize, the Poetry & People Award in 2009.

Translator's Note:

Born in Anhui Province in 1967, Yang Jian worked as a factory laborer for thirteen years. A practising Buddhist and scholar of Chinese traditional culture, he began writing poetry during the mid-’80s. Laureate of the first Yiu Li’an Poetry Award (1995), the ninth Rougang Poetry Award (2000), the first Yulong Poetry Award (2006), and the prestigious Chinese Media Literature Award (2008), his books of poetry include Dusk (2003), which was rated as one of the ten best books of the year, Old Bridge (2007), and Remorse (2009). Yang Jian also paints with ink and brush. He now lives in Ma’anshan, Anhui.

Translator's Note:

Yang Zi(1963- ), an acclaimed contemporary Chinese poet, is the author of a dozen books including Border Fast Train (1994), Gray Eyes (2000), and Rouge (2007). After his university studies in Chinese literature, he lived in Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region for nine years and co-founded the literary journal Big Bird. In 1990, he was appointed Vice Alderman of Tahaqi Village. Since 1993, he has lived in the southern coastal city Guangzhou and now works as the Associate Chief Editor of the Nanfang People Weekly. Also known as a poetry translator, he has introduced the works of Osip Mandelstam, Paul Celan, Fernando Pessoa, Gary Snyder, Charles Simic, and other Western poets to Chinese readers.

Translator's Note:

Additional translations of Bei Dao’s poetry by Clayton Eshleman and Lucas Klein may be found in Bookslut (September 2009); Jacket (Issue 38); and Jerome Rothenberg’s Poems and Poetics blog (October 2, 2009). A set also will appear in a forthcoming issue of New American Writing.

All of the poems have been translated and published with the permission of the author.

Earlier translations of the four poems presented here appear in Landscape Over Zero (New Directions, 1996; translated by David Hinton and Yanbing Chen).

Submissions

The Brooklyn Rail welcomes you to our web-exclusive section InTranslation, where we feature unpublished translations of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and dramatic writing. Published since April 2007, InTranslation is a venue for outstanding work in translation and a resource for translators, authors, editors, and publishers seeking to collaborate.

Guidelines

We seek exceptional unpublished English translations from all languages.Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry: Manuscripts of no longer than 20 pages (double-spaced).Plays: Manuscripts of no longer than 30 pages (in left-justified format).

Please provide short biographies for the translator(s) and original author(s), 1-2 paragraphs in length. Translators who wish to have their contact information published should provide it.

Please provide a translator's note, no more than 500 words in length. The note may include critical analysis, historical contextualization, personal anecdote, or any other details the translator considers pertinent or interesting.

Translators must have obtained permission to translate from the copyright holder of the original work, unless it is in the public domain. Please provide copyright information (the name of the copyright holder + the year of original publication) for the original work.